


Meltdown

by lonelyboy403



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Angst and Humor, Bisexual Characters, Body Horror, Comedy of Errors, Established Relationship, Gay Male Character, Gore, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Teen Angst, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-28 23:56:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16733076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyboy403/pseuds/lonelyboy403
Summary: The "zombie" apocalypse is in full swing, and the borders have been closed. Alliances and gangs have been formed, and inhibitions are being lost. It's been three years since Angel's Saltbreath was released in America. Drug addicts turned zombies are a great way to make teenagers deal with their shit and find their strengths.





	1. Breakfast

**Author's Note:**

> This is self indulgent as fuck and i'm so glad you clicked on it ^^ feedback is well appreciated.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> we are dumbasses.

Chapter One: Breakfast

Midnight. My time.

"Mig, time to wake up."

My eyes roll up and open to the nickname, pulling me out of the decision between sleep and consciousness.

"Tell me why I agreed to this job again?"

The room’s cold, lit only by candles. It’s pitch black outside. I’m not sure where I am at first. My only hints are the various sounds of people milling about, getting ready for bed. The floor is littered with people settling, using various ways to stay warm: cuddling each other, cuddling flannel sheets, bundling up in layer upon layer so they appear as swollen silhouettes. Without my glasses I can only see Emma's skinny, tall form, her skin glowing in the moonlight, crawling back into her sleeping bag. Next to her is shapeless lump rising and falling with breath that I can only guess is Caitlyn, who falls asleep the earliest.

"You agreed to it because your sleep pattern was already fucked, and you're tiny enough to protect," she mumbles, muffled.

"I guess that's true."

My legs ache like crazy, and kicking the sheets off reveals a large bruise starting to blossom on my knee, turning yellow. Lovely.

I blindly grope around the pile of clothes next to me, hoping to hear the distinctive clattering of my glasses. Eventually I do, and I slip them on, my surroundings coming into much more focus. Without them I’m pretty much blind.

Moonlight filters through a large, broken window. So _that's_ why it's freezing. I hadn’t seen it when I was brought in.

It was hot in the room when we had gotten here. It explained why I went to bed in boxers, at least, probably sleepily tugging off my pants before crawling under my covers. I giggle mentally at the image.

I rub my hands along my legs to warm them, the little hairs a rough tickle against my palms, and tug on a pair of leather leggings, and over them a pair of old sweatpants. Not exactly the most flattering, but zombie proof and comfortable. Remember; Teaspoon: Tight, Sparse, Protective. Besides, I know my ass will look good no matter what.

Walking over, I can see that the window overlooks a small grassy area closed in by four brick walls of the building. There was no way to reach it, it's just there for decoration.

Where _are_ we, anyway?

I poke my head out the broken window, carefully avoiding the glass, and crane my neck to read the sign on the side.

Fort Andross.

Oh shit, yeah. The same place we've been staying for the past month. Was something getting to my head?

Kalie and Sararose enter through the single doorway, wrapped in blankets and laughing. They both hold mugs in their hands, and their hair is wrapped up in their scarves to provide extra warmth.

Kalie is too tired from her day of patrols to really greet me, and just nods her head hello. Her face is red and slightly wet with tears, and that explains why she and Sararose were out of the room at midnight. She gives me a smile before crawling under her multicolored raglan laid in the corner closest to me. Tiny, her ginger, long-haired dachshund, shifts with the seemingly unwelcome motion before lapping from the mug and going back to her nap.

Our troupe is famous for several reasons around the area: our adorable, living dogs (three), our amount of girls with long hair (four) and our amount of members in general (about twenty, give or take) were the main ones.

Sararose sits next to me with a slight grunt. We sit in silence for a while; I can tell she’s thinking about a lot. Too often, a night rolled around where all of us were lonely and longed for our missing families or friends. Less often now that the snow had all melted, but still too much.

“What’s in the mugs?” I finally ask.

“Bit of chamomile made from boiled river water. Want some?”

“No.”

I watch her take a sip and shrug. Her strawberry blonde hair is falling out of a braid, not brushed for a while, and curtains over half of her face. I think how delicate she looks, then a strand and gets in her mouth. She sputters.

“It amazes me that you manage to find your little luxuries still.” I muse. She makes a noncommittal noise. “How late are you gonna stay up tonight?”

“With the help of this, hopefully not too long. The patrol today was fucking annoying. I’m out of bullets.”

She tells me about how she and Kalie fought a group of older salters who came out of the woods behind the fort, and while they were slow, they were big. I take note- it had been a couple blissful days without any combat, but I guess that’s over now.

I hear a groan and there's a shifting movement next to me, and I jump. I realize it's just Zach, black hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. I hadn’t realized he was there, surprisingly.

A bandage on his forehead glows in the white light. The blood that used to be bright red now stained it brown.

“Shut the fuck uuuuuup.” He moans.

Sararose raises her eyebrows. “Guess that’s my cue.” She leaves the mug on the windowsill and goes to lay down next to Kalie. In a minute, she’s asleep, just like everyone else, save for Sebastian, who’s still reading by lantern light.

I rest my head back on the white-brick window ledge to face the room, allowing my back to face the window and the door to my right for a few moments. Zach’s breathing, along with the assorted other sounds of sleep, are the only noise, and the room is eerily still.

 

I'm the official night watchman- more so, the person who stays awake when everyone else sleeps. I keep odd hours-- usually from about midnight to seven or so in the morning, but also when there’s an occasional group nap. Years ago I had taken the job with pride. Now it was just a mundane part of my identity, just like how Emma mended our clothes and Kalie gave haircuts.

 

I turn and move to sit on my legs and look outside, propping my chin up on the windowsill. The sky is already shifting to a bluer shade. I sigh. I resurface from some thoughts and check my watch, which tells me it’s two in the morning. Guess I had a few more hours to myself. I turn my body to face both the doorway and the window, and zone out again.

The last time I saw my parents in person, I was fifteen. It during was a spring break that never ended. We had started receiving new homework online, which we collectively shared the answers to, but even that was trickling down. I found myself with more free time than I knew what to do with. I spent most of it worrying about the future. It was still safe enough to leave your house, at least. Zombies were about as common as homeless people, although at this point the two groups overlapped almost completely. It was a new kind of normalcy where I just had to remember to keep a weapon on me.

My parents were getting ready to make an emergency trip across the country to check up on extended family, much like lots of my friend’s parents. Sararose’s had illegally traveled through to Canada a week prior to set up a new, safer home and would come back to get her and her brother.

Bad timing on their part, because it was right when a giant outbreak happened. The New York zombies reached Maine and were traveling north to combine with the Augusta group.  

Their first course of action was to send helicopters in to pick up people who were stuck inland and in heavily wooded northern Maine, where there were no zombies yet. That didn't last for too long, though. Once all the richer citizens were taken care of, it was pushed to the side as a less important project. It hadn't _really_ spread, had it? We were nowhere near what cult classic horror flicks depicted.

Alas.

I wave away the memories before they can continue and make me more sad than I need to be.

I hear shifting around the room and realize it’s about six, despite what the spring darkness tells me. I shamefully realize I had been thinking to myself for the better part of four and a half hours. On one hand, it was nice when time passed effortlessly. But what if a salter had crept up on me? I reminded myself again how many lives depended on me in those moments. The more people we adopted into the group, the more I had to protect. Hopefully, even though I took pride in being the only one, we would find another nightman soon.

"Mmh, is it really morning already? I could've sworn it was midnight two seconds ago."

I turn to see Emma is sat up and rubbing her face. Her hair is lopsided in a bun that had come undone overnight, and in the pale morning light, it's the same color of iced tea.

"Unfortunately, yeah. And after you feed me, I get to sleep!" I say with a weak smile. I move to sit in the middle of the floor, on a blanket where there isn't a weapon or a sleeping person. Turns out I had miscalculated and hear a grunt of protest. I'm uprooted when my seat rolls and sits up. It’s Sararose, somehow moved three feet from her original sleeping position hours ago.

"Dude, the fuck. I was dreaming about the little mermaid."

"Sorry. You might as well get up now." I shrug. I just want the extra company before I sleep.

"Fuck off, I’m sleeping in." She shifts and digs through her blankets to find her twin pistols, and once she does, she hugs them to her chest and rolls over. When they’re unloaded, she uses them as makeshift stuffed animals, despite my fear that one day she would forget, set them off, and blow a hole in her head. Somehow she had managed to avoid it.

I followed Emma and a couple other early risers who had woken down the hall. Fort Andross, in its prime, had multiple businesses in it, including a theater, antique store, and fancy restaurant. We had stocked the abandoned kitchen with food from the Hannaford's across the bridge. ( _That_ was a harrowing experience, acquiring that) We assumed even if we didn't eat it all, another group would find it and be grateful.

The dining room is a huge, white-brick room with tall windows along the walls facing the still dam next to the fort. Each window has a long, varnished wood table facing it, with a large lantern placed in the middle. There are already several people sitting and eating, some from our group and some outside it.

 

Locals, over the past month, had taken to showing up in the dining hall when the smell of Cheyenne and others’ cooking wafted out of the windows. We didn’t pay them much mind- they were fed what was available and sometimes left empty handed. All in all, they knew it was a safe space for them, as long as they behaved. They were outnumbered, and half of the time, outskilled-- half of the group was Old Dogs or childless parents.

There’s several gangs, groups, and categories that had formed once society had started adjusting. There’re only a few notable enough to know by name, such as The Fighters for God’s Country, or The FGC for short- a gang of older teen hicks who drove around in pickup trucks, flying the confederate flag and wearing camo. They were armed with hunting guns and guarded the local gas stations, keeping the fuel all for themselves. Or Another was the Old Dogs, a loose group of older men who mostly used to be lobstermen or clammers- usually all of them had grey whiskers and old, tired faces, and kept fishing knives and pistols on their belts. But they’re extremely kind-hearted. Sararose had gotten her twin pistols off of a dying one before we put him out of his misery, after he was bitten in a skirmish next to the Green Bridge.

The aforementioned Bridge faces us out the window, over the grey water and the eerily still dam, which hasn’t had water flowing over it for about a year now. The bridge itself is also seemingly frozen- with absolutely no cars on it, just melting snow.

Emma comes from the kitchen to tell me the food isn’t ready yet, and I sit on a windowsill to wait. Time passes, and more and more people start to thread into the kitchen. My closer friends all gather to the table adjacent to my window, grumbling. Most of them would be going back to bed after they ate. The table soon becomes packed and loud.

Sometimes I wonder how our little- well, not so little anymore- group had formed.

At first it was just me and Emma. I had walked over to her house one day, about a week after my parents left, and when I came through the door was greeted with the sight of two king-sized bedsheets spread out over _something_ on her living room floor. After a moment I saw her little pomeranian chewing on a hand that was poking out from the fabric.

Music was playing from the kitchen. I followed it and saw Emma, wrapped in a towel and hair wet from a shower, cooking. On the right of the room was about six dead salters. A butcher knife was sitting in the sink, waiting to be washed.

We sat down for lunch, and she told me they had been ambushed. Her parents, both tall like her, held their own in the fight but were quickly both bitten or scratched. In her adrenaline high, Emma took out her dad along with the rest of the salters, and before even saying goodbye, her mom killed herself right there.

I was shocked, but also...not. It wasn’t a secret to anyone that Emma’s dad was abusive, and I had honestly been waiting for this to happen. What I didn’t expect was for her mom to pass the same day.

We cleaned the house and had a bonfire that night.

Somehow, the two of us grew to three, then five, then steadily up to twenty.

Anyway.

The lights of the dining room flicker on, and the air is littered with cheers. Caitlyn _zooms_ to our room to grab everyone’s chargers.

Another thing that was new about our personal apocalypse: the electricity was completely unpredictable. Sometimes we would go an entire month having to use lanterns and saving the charge on our devices. Other times, we would have a joyful span of days with strong lights and heating. And when we came across somewhere with strong wifi? It was like the second coming of christ! Mostly, though, we had unreliable lighting, cold showers, and spotty internet access. We have no idea who’s managing it, or what’s working to cause the lights to buzz on in the middle of the night, prompting a little party so we could take advantage of the visibility. Of course, we were cautious not to attract salters.

Zach pokes my shoulder. “Helloo? Don’t fall asleep yet.” I make a face.

Breakfast has been brought out, finally. Cheyenne carries a giant pot, and Evie runs behind with another. Kalie’s little brother, DJ, trails behind, balancing a tall stack of bowls. Tiny and Bailey, Emma’s little black pomeranian I mentioned, run at their feet excitedly. They start to set everything down on the bar on the left side wall. We start to swarm both sides of it. Inside the pots is ramen, one labled _al dante._ I look at Chey, and she sheepishly smiles. “It was the only thing we had enough of to cook for everyone. There’s a big group today.”  
I wave my hand. “Don’t worry! I’m just glad you woke up enough to cook. Although...ramen only takes a few minutes to cook, what took so long?”

Evie, who had been laying flavor packets down in a line in front of me, to be snatched and put into individual bowls, comes over and hugs me from behind.

“We had to unpackage all thirty of them, and then I burned myself.” She says, sleepily, into my back. I see one of her hands joined around my waist is bandaged. I laugh just a little bit.

DJ re-emerges from the kitchen with a basket of energy bars and canned fruit. I fill myself a bowl, grab some chili shrimp powder, apples in syrup, and a granola bar after carefully poring over it’s ingredients.

Surprisingly, one of the biggest personal difficulties I have in my situation is my deadly nut allergy. Nuts are an important part of our protein-based diet, and I was _constantly_ trying to avoid them. I don’t have it as bad as Kalie, though. She’s vegan and gluten-free on top of many other sensitivities outnumbering mine.

I walk back to my table, admiring the old paintings hanging cockeyed on the dining room wall. The restaurant also used to serve as a gallery. My favorite hangs over my table: a dark-skinned child wearing a ram’s skull, surrounded by cherry blossoms. The restaurant's last exhibit was some artists’ responses to the turmoil of Saltbreath spreading, and how a lot of people weren’t getting help. Most of the paintings were dark and scary-looking, but the one of the woman in the skull seemed to be almost... hopeful. My interpretation of it was the blossoming of a new generation that accepted death because we were surrounded by it. That’s definitely what my group had come to be.

As soon as I sit down, there’s a giant crash from down the hall, past our sleeping quarters. I hope it’s just someone fucking around, but by the simultaneous text tones of ten phones, I know it’s not. God _damn._ Hopefully this would be over quick enough so my noodles don’t get cold.

Emma runs past me. “I got a text from Cait. She said she saw at least three but there are more coming in the door.”

I set my food down on the closest table and dart to catch up with her and the others pouring out of the room. I picked up my speed. I took a quick glance behind me. Thankfully, almost everyone had their weapons with them. _Fuck._ Why didn’t I grab my hammer? _Stupid. I should probably stay in here_. But I won’t miss a chance to miss a fight-- although, I won’t admit that.

I push ahead and reach the Emma at front of the throng. “What should I do?!” I shout over the running footsteps and yells coming from ahead.

She wordlessly shrugs, steps to the side, and crouches. With her free hand she points a thumb at her back. My question is answered.

I hop onto her back and lock my arms and legs tight around her torso. She stands straight up and I bounce slightly when my weight is distributed properly. She goes back into a run, quickly reaching the front again. I know she’s probably channeling her old track team self, imagining a school field in front of her. We hear Caitlyn screaming, not scared, but angry. We turn the corner to see her keeping a pack of Salters back what looks like a... flamethrower? But with a squint I see she’s using hairspray and her lighter.

 _“Somebody left the fucking back door open!!”_ She bellows. Emma jumps next to her. Caitlyn ceases her wall of fire, tosses her supplies to the side, and steps back to let Emma draw her knife.

It really was a beauty. Twice the size of my trusty butcher knife, slightly curved with red leather straps Emma had tied to it. We had found it in the house of some old school teacher, one that we found refuge in for a few nights. It was a perfect weapon for her; she couldn’t use her gloves all the time anyway, they would start to hurt her wrists.

She holds one hand on my arm to keep me steady and uses the other to behead three salters in one fell swoop. Another two surge forward, and I panic for a second before watching her stab one in the jugular. She twists her knife and aims the steady stream of blood for the second one’s eyes, blinding it. She must’ve learned that move from Sam. She doesn’t usually use calculated moves like that unless she needs to buy time. Do I need to panic again?

Before I can decide, she taps my arm two times, signaling to hold on tighter. I do, and she turns quickly. Her knife is wedged in the blinded salter’s forehead. He’s trying to inch closer, arms starting to reach towards us, but Emma yells _“Fuck off!”,_ lunges forward quickly, and gores the other in one move on the end of the blade. She uses both arms to grab the handle, drags them down with swim team strength, and the blade splits the bodies in half with a sickening crack. She draws her arm back and barely waited for them to fall before sprinting forward.

Yeah, Emma is a berserker when she fights.

You wouldn’t expect it, but with all her pent-up anger at a world that gave her her parents and took away her friends, she needs an outlet.

I looked behind us at the three bodies we leave behind, but they’re just a pile of blood and skin. Geez. Sometimes I forget how easy it is to fight slowly rotting flesh. Not like I’m not giving Emma credit.

We reach our room, and I spring off to run to my sleeping bag. I almost jump for joy when I feel the familiar weight of my hammer finally in my hand. There’s movement behind me and I whirl around, arms raised in smashing position. It’s just Sam. His green eyes look like they’re just about to pop out of his head.

“Aah, calm down. Let’s go.”

The three of us head down an eerily quiet hallway. We turn a corner on our way to rejoin the group when the top half of a salter comes crawling towards it. It’s going slow, but Sam still yells in terror and busts it’s head open with a really loud shot from his blue revolver, which he then hugs to his chest. I laugh and then sprint forward when I see Sebastian at the end of the hall. He has a very dark red, fresh stain on his shoulder. Over the opposite he holds his sledgehammer, the sharpened side dripping foul-smelling blood onto the floor. In the other hand he clutches his other weapon, a trusty double-sided knife.

“Did you get any?” I ask, out of breath.

He laughs. “One, but, you know, it’s other half got away. Thanks for finishing off that bitch. He had the tiniest penis I’ve ever seen on a zamb.”

I look at him for a second and then burst out laughing. He and Caitlyn have a contest running.

“How many more are there?”

“About eight up ahead, but a group ran past me to get to ‘em. Including Evie and Kalie. So they...shouldn’t last long.”

“Should we bother?”

“I think we got all we can, so let’s just head to the showers. Zach and Sam are on cleaning duty.” Emma says. I look behind me to see Sam’s reaction, which is his brow furrowing in annoyance. He shoves his gun into his pocket and sulks off without a word.

I laugh for a second. Sam is...a weirdo, to put it plainly. He walks around looking like he was struck by lightning, with his wide-as-hell eyes and black hair sticking up in basically any angle that was possible. Cait liked to describe him as having a “school shooter look”. I had known him since I was six, but we hadn’t really been friends until Emma and him started dating. Even though they had long since broken up, we still valued his silent confused company.

Emma calls after him. “Hey, it’s not that bad! We only soaked one hallway this time!”

Following Sebastian and Emma to the female showers, I started to daydream about my lukewarm ramen that was only a few rooms away. I pushed away the more blissful thoughts of fresh rolls and muffins with big, square crystals of sugar on top. Maybe someday.

The day was turning out to be a sunny one, at least. The early morning light filters through the windows and over the tiled floor of the bathroom.

For the lack of good showers, we soak a few towels in lukewarm water and start to scrub. I try to ignore the fact that some of them were used yesterday. Gotta save resources.

I remind Sebastian to at least adjust his binder if he’s not going to take it off after I do. “You know they shift, and we both have asthma. The worst way to die would be suffocating ‘cause of our titties.” He blows me a raspberry and disappears into a stall.

At least we don’t have to take full-body showers (Not like we could), just make sure nothing had gotten into our eyes, mouth, uncovered injuries, etcetera. Even though it was a routine we went through almost every day, it was still scary each time. We never knew if a melancholic cry would ring out across the building and we would find out that another kid had been infected.

Seb and I wait for Emma, who has to wring a lot of blood out of her long honey-brown hair and scrub it off most of her. Then the three of us head back to the dining room.


	2. Prologue

Crystal's saltbreath is what the drug’s called, informally. It was never granted the honor of a scientific name. A biological weapon released on a huge scale to America in the third world war that successfully brought it to a downfall. The drug was imported into six cities: New York, New York, Los Angeles, California, and Chicago, Illinois, Cheyenne, Wyoming, Austin, Texas, and Augusta, Maine. It was mixed into shipments of cocaine and other powdered drugs.

It wasn’t even addictive, just debilitated it’s users with one dose- but the users were about a million in number and growing by the time the government was made aware of it, and when the country’s borders had eventually been secured, it had risen to about a fourth of the population, condensed into poorer areas in the bigger cities and spreading outwards. By the time each state’s border was secured, it was too late. The users of the drug would immediately become disassociated, mindless, and erratic. The first and lasting effects is deterioration of eye tissues that causes them to become black, and then a deficiency in retaining minerals that makes the skin extremely sensitive and prone to injury and eventually rot. The user wouldn’t care though, they’d be busy seeing hallucinations, and feel threatened by surrounding people who moved faster than them, attacking them with brutality. If bodily fluids were exchanged, through bites, scratches, etc, the drug would enter the victim’s bloodstream and they would become the same.

It had started just three years ago. It feels like forever ago now, but I know there was a world before this one. 

I'm too young to remember the day it all went downhill. It's like 9/11, something you hear about all the time, and you somehow feel directly connected to it, but you were barely a person when it took place. Some of the older people I've met said their hearts stopped when they heard the radio announcement. That was the first indication some got. Others found out over the internet or by word of mouth. 

"It was just like the movies, so much we thought maybe it wasn’t real. We hoped. Remember 'War of the Worlds'?" My dad had told me. He said it in a voice that came from the corner of his mouth. "Flesh-eating drug addicts are overtaking Lewiston. Residents in that area are advised to stay indoors at all costs. Food will be airlifted to you...blah, blah, blah. So much for that. The area was too poor for anyone to care until it was too late."

What a great bedtime story.

Now I haven’t seen him since the borders were secured, two years ago. My parents were visiting and helping family when they were trapped there, and the hope they were still alive was what kept me going every day. That, and the hope that me and my troupe would escape ourselves, to the outside.

This is the story of the meltdown.


End file.
